Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.
Eternal September | Know Your Meme
Eternal September is a slang term that refers to the time period of the Internet since September 1993, when Usenet saw its heaviest influx of newbies into
Two Takes on the Eternal September
September, and with it the start of classes at most educational institutions in the United States, is almost upon us. In honor of this, I’d like to look back this week on the September that started twenty-eight years ago in 1993 and is still continuing: Usenet’s Eternal September. Twenty-eight years in, I still don’t think we understand exactly what the implications of this change were, nor have we decided what direction Internet communities should turn in response. I don’t have all the answers either, but I’d like to suggest two useful ways of thinking about it.
It's September, Forever
The 'Eternal September' was a 1993 backlash against unwanted internet users. It never ended.
Usenet
Usenet, short for User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that were developed after the introduction of the World Wide Web. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
The Attention Forum: October 23/24th 2025
The internet was initially sold to us as a force for connection – a borderless, democratizing set of technologies that would amplify voices, allow us to spread ideas, and strengthen civil society.
Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet
The year is 2025. The internet in the shape that we've known it in the early 2000s is no longer there. Or, not quite in the shape that we've seen it before. This is not just plain nostalgia talking - the vibrant ecosystem of blogs, feeds, personal sites, and forums has been usurped by a few mega-concentrated players.
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet
Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.
Was their any substantial backlash to the internet when it first started becoming popular? I can imagine that going from a comparatively disconnected world to one where instantaneous global connection 24/7 were commonplace was a rather massive (and not always positive) shift in many ways.
2.7M subscribers in the AskHistorians community. The Portal for Public History. Please read the rules before participating, as we remove all comments…
rip.so :: the digital graveyard
A memorial to the messengers, social networks, browsers and websites the internet forgot.
NLnet; Welcome to NLnet Foundation
We support organisations and people who contribute to an open internet for all. We fund projects that help fix the internet through open hardware, open software, open standards, open science and open data. After its historical contribution to the early internet in Europe in the 1980's, NLnet has been financially supporting the open internet since 1997.
Deals
Find the best Usenet deals, discounts, and promotions from top Usenet providers.
